Politische Rede als Interaktionsgefüge: Der Fall Hitler

The book examines seven speeches by Hitler from the period 1933 to 1944 (including a first edition in the Appendix). Political speech-making is understood as an instance of communicative interplay between speaker and audience. Its dialogic structure is foregrounded with reference to the guiding concept of Emphase (emphatic oratory) and by means of interrelated, quantifying rhetorical analysis (style, prosody, semantics) and the links between those factors and active audience response. In the referential relationship between the speeches and their historical context we see the way in which the degree of political rhetoric employed and its 'success' or 'failure' are conditioned by situational factors. The insights gained from linguistic interaction analysis reflect the course taken by historical events.